A Comparative Analysis Of Dialogic Features Between EPHN And EPE

As the world is entering into information age, news is playing an increasingly important role not only in delivering information but also in influencing people’s view. While writing a news article, the writers are engaged in certain dialogic interaction with potential readers. They may refer to previous proposition, negotiate current views or make assumptions about likely response to certain propositions.Appraisal Theory (AT), as a lexico-grammatical framework to explore interpersonal meaning developed from Systemic Functional Grammar (SFL), is aimed at evaluating how language users employ linguistic resources to express semantics of evaluation, and explore, describe and explain the way the language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances and to manage interpersonal relations. Engagement system, as a sub-system of AT, in particular, attends to dialogic features of discourse. The present study is carried out to employ engagement system to examine how English political hard news (EPHN) and English political editorials (EPE) conduct dialogic interaction with potential readers. Two questions will be answered:1) Is there any significant difference between EPHN and EPE in terms of distribution of different engagement resources?2) How does different distribution of engagement resources in EPHN and EPE lead to their different dialogic features? Or how do the two different genres realize different dialogic patterns through utilizing different engagement resources?In this study, a total of60articles among which30are EPHN and the other30are EPE are analyzed. Question1is explored through statistical analysis by the help of UAM CorpusTool. Through coding and statistics of the60articles, it is found that in EPHN, dialogic expansion resources account for a larger percentage of69.01%, while dialogic contraction resources only take up30.99%, thus revealing that in EPHN, news writers tend to adopt a dialogically expansive stance towards potential readers and open dialogic space for alternative voices. On the other hand, in EPE, dialogic contraction resources amount to a percentage of55.21%, which is a little bit higher, namely14.79percentage points, than that of expansion, which demonstrates that in EPE, writers tend to narrow dialogic space for alternative voices.In addition, within the categories of contract and expand, sub-branches of the two broad items also differ between EPHN and EPE. In addition to contract and expand, high statistical significance between the two news genres is also found in deny, counter, concur, endorse, entertain, attribute, acknowledge and distance.After statistical analysis of60media texts, the second step is "sample text analysis". Explanation and interpretation work will be performed to conduct detailed analysis on two sample texts from EPHN and EPE. Such analysis will be focused on detailed explanation of how different distribution of engagement resources influences dialogic features of the two types of news genres, which acts as a complement to question2.The present study is expected to shed light on comparative study of news discourse and enrich the application of AT especially engagement system. In addition, it also aims to facilitate news writing and reading.